The Divine Dance

by Richard Rohr

  If you grew up Christian, surely you’ve heard that saying tossed around—maybe before the preacher asked for women to volunteer in the kitchen for fellowship hour!

  But have you ever stopped to think what’s really happening here? Jesus is saying there is a moral equivalence between you, your neighbor, the Christ, and God!

  This is an amazing chain of being that is not evident to the casual seer. This new ontology—this new way of shaping reality—is the core and foundation of the entire Christian revelation and revolution.

  This is meant to utterly reshape our understanding of who God is and where God is.

  Of who we are and where we are.

  Will you allow it?

  God is no longer “out there,” which religion, from the beginning of time, has imagined.

  One must ask, “What is the new experience that allows all four Gospels to talk in such a counter-intuitive yet self-assured way?”

  Trinity in Eternity Past

  But first we need to get back to the beginning—really, before the beginning. We need to stretch our hearts and imaginations to the pre-existent Christ, the “eternally-begotten One,” spoken of in the very first chapter or paragraph of John’s gospel, Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, 1 John, and probably 2 Peter.

  How did we manage to miss this? No thing became Some thing from the very beginning! But what was before the beginning?

  This conundrum made early theologians ask, “Is the universe itself eternal?” At this point, the human mind cannot compute any more and has to give up. I plead ignorance.

  Let’s attempt to describe the eternal Son, remembering full well that the earliest apprentices of Jesus were—just as we are—searching for metaphors to describe this movement, this shape of God, this reality. They came up with metaphors that a lot of people don’t like today, especially because we think they’re masculine—which they are. But I invite you to suspend this linguistic particularity for a minute to get to its underlying meaning; then you won’t be tied to the metaphor so much.

  As described earlier, the Father is the mystery of total given-ness. God is given-ness itself. I hope you catch the implications of this: if God is absolute given-ness, then the flow is always and forever in one positive direction; any stumbling talk of God’s anger, God’s wrath, or God doing any kind of withholding is spiritually, theologically impossible.

  The waterwheel only and forever flows in one direction.

  Human language and biblical texts simply have to talk this way to communicate our own experiences of loss, darkness, and inner dryness.

  Recall Rene Girard’s idea that the Scriptures are best seen as a text in travail; as the biblical narrative edges forward three steps, it invariably gets scared by the implications of where the Story’s going—and so it pulls back two steps. Jesus alone is the living and dynamic Word, adjusting to the readiness capacity of every age. Written words are forever and always metaphors. They can be nothing else. When we forget that distinction, we soon become idolatrous and eventually policemen, but seldom mystics.

  Bible thumpers are invariably people who prefer the two-steps-backward portions of Scripture—they love to quote anything that’s vengeful, repressive, violent, exclusionary, or fearful. We see as we are, and a large percentage of humanity first formed its psychic world inside the punishing, fearfully warning parent world. It is hard to change, even if it makes your life small and scared.

  If you need revenge, frankly you’re going to love a vengeful god. If you like war, you’re going to love a warlike god, and you’re going to even create a warlike god. Behind every mistaken event is a mistaken image—a mistaken understanding of God.

  If you are comfortable with both the receiving and extending of friendship, you will be ready and eager for the Trinity.

  You will be a witness to your own transformation. It will ask everything of you, but it will also give everything to you.

  Most of us have been taught, You should be generous and giving!—and we often feel guilty because we’re not giving enough. Fewer of us were taught how to humbly receive the same divine generosity. But when there is no flow inward, it is usually impossible to sustain the flow outward.

  Let me share an astounding bit of poetry from Meister Eckhart, the wonderful fourteenth-century German Dominican mystic:

  Do you want to know

  what goes on in the core of the Trinity?

  I will tell you.

  In the core of the Trinity

  the Father laughs

  and gives birth to the Son.

  The Son laughs back at the Father

  and gives birth to the Spirit.

  The whole Trinity laughs

  and gives birth to us.236

  God has done only one constant thing since the beginning of time: God has always, forever, and without hesitation loved “the Son,” understood in this sense as creation, the material universe, you, me—and yes, you can equally and fittingly use “the Daughter.” Remember, the quality of the relationship is the point, not gender or anything else.

  God cannot not love his universally-begotten child in you, and the “part” of you that already knows and enjoys this is the indwelling Spirit.

  And do you know that the flow is also in both directions? The divine child also “creates” the Father as Father—as any parent can attest. A parent is not truly a parent until the child returns the flow. Watch the joy or tears on a mother or father’s face when their little one first says “Mama!” or “Dada!”

  It’s the universe in a moment.

  Anything less than this laughter, liking, delighting, and loving—the world simply doesn’t have time for! And neither do you.

  The world is now repositioned on a totally positive ground and foundation. The bankrupt, sad storyline of guilt, shame, reward, and punishment never got Western civilization very far anyway. When you start in a hole, you never really get out of the hole. But when you start with original blessing, life only grows bigger and always much better.

  The Wildest Wave Alive

  I’d like to share a portion of a favorite poem with you—“The Rose”:

  Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,

  Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself,

  As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,

  And I stood outside myself

  Beyond becoming and perishing,

  A something wholly other,

  As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,

  And yet was still.

  And I rejoiced in being what I was.237

  There’s so much about this poem that resonates with me, but especially the phrase “I swayed out on the wildest wave alive.” I think we’re all swaying on this wave, whether we know it or not. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, what has drawn you to these pages is bringing this mystery of the Trinitarian flow—the wildest wave alive—to ever-higher levels of consciousness.

  It isn’t enough to merely know that this wave is flowing through us; Spirit actually delights in it! The foundation of authentic Christian spirituality is not fear, but joy. Not hatred, but love. It’s not terror of God but actually participation in the very mystery of God.

  You see, if we’re completely different than God, there is an impassable gulf between us. You can’t know something that’s totally different than you are; the idea of such a remote God is reflected by the Deists and Neoplatonic philosophers.

  What the mystery of Trinity—this wildest wave alive—is showing us, by contrast, is that the principle of likeness is at work. The indwelling presence of the Spirit within us already knows God, already loves God, and is already in love with God. There’s nothing we can add to or subtract from this! All we can do is jump on this train, which is already moving.

  Most people shy away. They
are the divine mystery, but unfortunately, they’re not enjoying it. They’re not drawing consciously upon their Source. If I had to give the most simple definition of a Christian, this is it: simply one who is consciously drawing upon their Source.

  Not which rituals you perform. They’re extraneous; they’re all going to die.

  Not which commandments you obey. That leaves you taking your own temperature of how worthy you are; it doesn’t get you closer to God at all!

  Paul made it very clear in Romans and Galatians that obeying commandments will not lead you to the experience of God. And yet I would bet 85 percent of Christians still think they’re going to come to God by doing it right. There’s no evidence that this works. In fact, quite the contrary. This preoccupation with being right and doing it right usually creates—forgive me for being so blunt—anal-retentive personalities. They’re usually judgmental, preoccupied with themselves, and very often not in love with God, in love with life, or in love with their fellow humans.

  Because you can obey commandments without being in the wildest wave alive. Ego can do that, self can do that; but God alone can bring us into this flow of Trinity.

  Real Presence

  You can’t be present with your mind alone; the mind replays the past and frets about the future most of the time. It does not know how to be present without including the heart, the body, and the soul. Presence is a two-way and body-length mirror, and Trinity teaches us to reflect this grounded reality.

  In the Catholic lineage, we taught—and I would defend—the belief in the “real presence” of Jesus in the bread and the wine in the Eucharist, or Communion. We were very good at maintaining that end of the spectrum, a belief in the objective presence of God in the material, physical world. Catholicism, much better than our Protestant brothers and sisters, takes Incarnation to its logical conclusions—without fully realizing it, I might add.

  “If God is present in people, in history, in creation,” a Catholic or Orthodox believer might wonder, “then why not also extend real presence to focus, resistance, and hopeful surrender in the lowest, humblest, and yet universal, elemental foods of bread and wine?”

  If we cannot accept Presence in this piece of earth, then why should we accept it in ourselves or others? How could we? It is one and the same act of faith and leap of logic. Here Incarnation has gone full length and breadth.

  But do you know what none of us did very well? We didn’t teach our people how to be present here and there and everywhere, and unless we are present before the Presence, there is no Real Presence for us. Presence, like all true prayer—like Trinity itself—is all about “interface knowing,” which I called mirroring earlier in the book.

  That for me is the reform of all religion.

  Being and Becoming

  Thus, if God the Father is the Un-manifest, then the Christ is the original movement into Manifestation, and you might say that the Holy Spirit is the Knower and Reminder of the universal Manifestation. The more open you are to the Holy Spirit’s prompting and invitations, the wider your seeing becomes.

  Now we have the basis for a very grounded eco-spirituality.

  Now we have the basis for the goodness and importance of all creation, and not just the human species.

  Here we have a very Franciscan spirituality of appreciation for the entire length and breadth of the great chain of being: animals and everything that’s created, such as rocks, water, and plants. All manifest reality is out-flowing from this mystery, and as our mystic St. Bonaventure taught, everything is thus a footprint and a fingerprint revealing the nature of God.238

  How different would our history, and our religious history, have been if we had known this and allowed it to be true?

  If Trinity is the inner pattern of God, then Jesus—to say it one more time—is the outer, visible pattern, which contains a big surprise and frankly a disappointment for us:

  Loss and renewal, loss and renewal. Death as the price of resurrection.

  Remember that even our sun is dying, and it’s just one minor star in a galaxy of much larger stars. It’s dying to itself to the tune of six hundred million tons of hydrogen per second. The sun is constantly dying, while also giving life to our solar system and to every single thing that lives on our planet.

  That’s the pattern. Nothing lives long-term without dying in its present form.

  Death is not the opposite of life, but the full process of life.

  Life has no opposite!

  That’s why the early Mothers and Fathers of the Church would say a most daring thing. They would say—and this might be shocking to you reading this—that even God suffers.

  Jesus is the suffering and dying of God visible for all to see.

  Essential Ecstasy

  As long as we have the Zeus-notion of God that I mentioned earlier, we can’t make much progress. He is a power-hungry, remote-control god at the top of the hierarchy of gods, throwing down thunderbolts and favoring a very few chosen ones. He is always a he; he is almighty, but not equally all-vulnerable, as our Trinity is. Our collective and cultural understanding of God, I’m sorry to report, hasn’t moved much beyond the “Almighty God” language we took for granted; we haven’t realized that God has forever redefined divine power in the Trinity! The Christian God’s power comes through his powerlessness and humility. Our God is much more properly called all-vulnerable than almighty, which we should have understood by the constant metaphor of “Lamb of God” found throughout the New Testament. But unfortunately, for the vast majority, he is still “the man upstairs,” a substantive noun more than an active verb. In my opinion, this failure is at the basis of the vast expansion of atheism, agnosticism, and practical atheism we see in the West today. “If God is almighty, then I do not like the way this almighty God is running the world,” most modern people seem to be saying. They do not know that the Trinitarian revolution never took root! We still have a largely pagan image of God.

  But once you experience this changing of the gods, you have a solid and attractive basis for Christianity as a path—a mystical and dynamic Christianity concerned about restorative justice and reconciliation at every level, here and now.

  All you have to do today is walk outside and gaze at one leaf, long and lovingly, until you know, really know, that this leaf is a participation in the eternal being of God. It’s enough to create ecstasy. It is not the inherent dignity of the object that matters; it is the dignity of your relationship to the object that matters—that transforms object to subject, as Martin Buber famously put it, shifting from an I-It orientation to the world to an I-Thou relationship.239 For a true contemplative, a green tree works just as well as a golden tabernacle.

  In an otherwise weak poem I once created in my journal, I wrote (wisely, I think): “All are an echoed ecstasy.”

  But we’ve been robbed! All creatures naturally allow and inherently communicate this ecstasy—except for the human species. We discriminate, decide, qualify, and dissociate almost all whom we look at instead of loving them as they are.

  We’re the only ones who deprive ourselves of essential ecstasy.

  If you doubt this, just watch your dog. Dogs don’t stop the ecstasy. You get tired of them jumping up and licking you, but they don’t. It’s pure, unadulterated, fascinated enjoyment being a dog, apparently. And then most of them just lie down one day and die. No drama.

  The dog doesn’t question reality.

  It doesn’t anguish in existential malaise, beating its paws in the dirt and asking, Why aren’t I a duck?

  Apparently, dogs just like being dogs, mulberry trees like being mulberry trees, and bees like doing what bees do; the red snapper does not mind if we name her “red snapper,” although surely she knows her real name. All things give glory to God just by being what they are.

  There’s only one species that resists being what it is, and that’s us. Ironically, we’r
e resisting our own happiness. This is God’s suffering: that the one species whom God gave free will to has used it to say no to itself, and thus no to most other things, too. This is negative mirroring. If you refuse the ecstasy, you also bequeath the refusal.

  That is probably what we mean by sin.

  We largely refuse ecstasy via our mind games, our mental explanations, our theories, and our theological nit-picking.

  Yes, God gave you your own remote control, just as we imagined Zeus to be operating earth by remote control. You can use yours to change to any channel you want. You can even use it to exit the whole system. I guess this is why almost all religions felt it necessary to posit the logical possibility of something like hell.240

  Trinity proclaims that God is no remote-controller but instead lovingly operates from within. Its utter relational given-ness says that humans do have a remote control, granting us more power than we’ve ever imagined.

  Too Good to Be True?

  This full participation has been just too much for the psyche to believe. That’s why we’ve felt compelled to backtrack, creating what I think every Christian church has in its own way: various flavors of debt codes, worthiness codes, test cases, ritual requirements, and achievement goals.

  I want to say this as strongly as I can: If you’re caught up in these numbing-out schemes, you’re missing the core message of the gospel. You cannot earn something you already have. You cannot achieve something that is already freely and totally given to you.

  A Trinitarian spirituality leaves guilt and shame in the dust, re-centering Christianity on—dare I say it—realization and rest. What finally motivates you in this spiritual life is gratitude, never fear. Even duty and obligation work well only in the short run; in the long term, they create—forgive me again—anal-retentive people. I have seen them in monasteries, in morning Masses, and in mosques all over the world.

  But now you know that the waterwheel is ever turning, always forward, and animated by the river itself. Not by your pushing!

  Karl Rahner, one of the architects of the Second Vatican Council and my favorite European theologian, whom I quoted previously, said it so well: “But we have to say of the God whom we profess in Christ: that he is exactly where we are, and only there is he to be found.”241